Investigating the Principles of “Good Farming”: A Comparison of Traditional Agrarianism and Indigenous Land Use and Cultivation

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In his long career as an agrarian writer, Wendell Berry has documented and endorsed the precepts of “good farming” as those that require care, knowledge, self-mastery, good sense, cultural memory, and fundamental decency. This carefully crafted set of practices stands in stark opposition to the aggressive colonial economy that drives industrial farming across much of America and the world and ultimately impoverishes the land and resource base as well as the communities who tend them. Berry’s conception of agrarianism as a highly skilled, iterative, and dynamic set of processes that bind people to landscapes in enduring relationships has significant parallels with the principles accorded by Indigenous First Peoples to long-standing territories in the Pacific Northwest. In this paper, we describe Indigenous management practices developed to create and sustain a variety of anthropogenic habitats and documented over millennia in Katzie, Sts’ailes, and Tsymshen territories, investigate the common strategies and ideologies shared with traditional agrarianism, and consider the opportunities this knowledge offers to improve land-use models in the midst of a world in climate crisis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36126.0